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Madame d'Ora, photographer of the stars of the 20th century’s art and fashion

Leopold Museum in Vienna presents "Make me beautiful"; a summer exhibition dedicated to the work of Madame d'Ora, a photographer that captured the great names of the 20th century’s world of art and fashion, aristocracy and politics.

Dora Kallmus, known professionally as Madame D'Ora (born March 20, 1881) was an Austrian portrait and fashion photographer who established her own studio in 1907. Within only a few months, d’Ora and her colleague Arthur Benda had established themselves as the most elegant and renowned studio for artistic portrait photographs while the studio’s images were widely published in numerous newspapers and magazines in Austria and abroad. The first artist photographed by her was Gustav Klimt in 1908.

D’Ora was one of the first photographers to focus on the emerging areas of modern dance and fashion, particularly after 1920, when fashion photographs started to replace drawings in magazines. While her photographic technique was not radical, her avant-garde subject matter was a risky choice for a commercial studio. However, d’Ora’s photographs, which captured her clients’ individuality with new, natural positions in contrast to stiff, old-fashioned poses, quickly became popular.

In 1925 an offer from the fashion magazine L’Officiel brought d’Ora to Paris, which became the center of her personal and professional life. She received countless commissions from fashion and lifestyle magazines. Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Marc Chagall, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, writers and members of the Rothschild family.

Both the subject and style of d’Ora’s photographs changed radically after the war. Already in 1945 she documented the plight of refugees at a camp in Austria and in 1956, at the age of seventy-five, completed a series vividly depicting the brutality of Paris slaughterhouses. After she was hit by a motorcycle in 1959, d’Ora lost much of her memory and was unable to work. She spent her remaining years in Frohnleiten, Austria, in the family house that had been forcibly sold under the Nazis but later returned to her. She died on October 28, 1963. Her very last portrait was that of Pablo Picasso in 1955.